My first PC had 3 hard drives. The 1st is SSD, the other two are old. The third one which is 500 GB hasn't been scandisked for years. I decided to run a scandisk to it because "My Computer" was responding very slow in recognising hard drives.

I run scandisk, and the loading bar stuck at about 35%. Then I saw a message that I was "out of memory"! By pressing Ctrl+ALT+DEL I realised that explorer.exe was occupying 6GB out of 8GB RAM that I have! (Previously I had installed Photoshop CS6 and was running many programs).

So finally because scandisk was stuck at "scanning 80 files or something" I decided to press Ctrl+Alt+Del and terminate the explorer.exe . But this closed all windows applications and I was left with only my desktop background and nothing else! The final thing I did was pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del again and disconnecting. Now I have the "Disconnecting" screen for more than half an hour. I'm stuck there.

Any solutions? I will go to sleep and leave the PC open the return after 8 hours so that it actually "Logs off" and I'm able to close it. I'm afraid that if I manually shut down my PC from the power button I might lose data from my old hard drive which is scanned right now.

What should I do if after 8 hours the "Disconnecting" screen still appears? Just shut down and pray? I guess it still runs scandisk on the background.....or not due to low memory?